Who had the best Fantastic Four run? Who had the worst Fantastic Four run? That was the question I wanted to answer myself as opposed to believing the talking heads and parrots with no perspective or hands on knowledge of actually reading every FF issue, so I created a rating system and formula to create a fair way to judge Fantastic Four runs. You can read my posts about methodology here and here.

Rated solely on the quality of each issue ranked in Movie Stars (****) here’s the Top 5 Fantastic Four runs- for most people that is enough to make a judgement, but that’s like saying Pete Rose was the best baseball hitter in history because he had the most hits. That being said, in strictest terms, there is some validly in this:

1. Walt Simonson: 3.89 stars
2. Mark Millar: 3.75 stars
3. Carlos Pacheco: 3.7 stars
4. Stan Lee/Jack Kirby: 3.59 stars
5. Mark Waid: 3.5 stars

The problem with just using the average rating per comic issue is that there is a glaring omission: John Byrne’s run averaged 3.21 stars; he was responsible for 63 issues. Therefore we must also look at level of production. Here are the Top 5 Longest Fantastic Four runs:

1. Stan Lee/Jack Kirby:  102 issues
2. John Byrne: 63 issues
3. Tom Defalco: 61 issues
4. Steve Englehart and 5. Mark Waid each had 30 issues

So striking a balance between quality and production is necessary to reach an informed conclusion.

This chart shows the ranking of Fantastic Four Normalized Comic Book Run Value (not stars). The average run length of a writer on the Fantastic Four comic (a run = at least 6 issues) is 25.33 issues. This does not include the current FF run by Hickman, which is ongoing. In other words, 25.33 is the mean- a creative team gets penalized for not reaching that value, and rewarded for surpassing it. A “standard schlock” comic book story gets a quality score of 2 stars. We all know what a 2-star movie is: it’s “just okay” or passable. Same idea when I give a comic book a 2-star rating. The normalized rating compares the average quality score of a comic book run to 2 stars. A normalized score of 0 means that a run that averaged 2 stars and was 25 issues: the true statistical mean.

As you can see from the above chart, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s run of over 100 issues averaging over 3.5 stars puts them head and shoulders above everyone else. Once I apply this methodology on other comic book runs I’ve read, I have a hunch Lee and Kirby’s FF run may be the best ever for any run. This value can be compared to other runs, since it uses the 2-star comparison. It also shows you if the comic book run was “good” (a positive value) or “bad” (a negative value) and by how much. This also leapfrogs John Byrne to his rightful place as #2.

The above graph compares all the different Fantastic Four runs to- not a theoretical 2-star comic book, but to an average Fantastic Four comic book, which is 2.72 stars (not including Hickman’s current run). In other words, it contains the runs inside the Fantastic Four title, so we can better answer questions like “How does JMS’s run rank compared to other FF runs?” as opposed to a theoretical 2-star comic book. A score 0f zero would be a run that averaged 25 issues averaging 2.72 stars. Therefore this chart truly weeds out runs that don’t meet the FF’s standards, and allow you to see the differences (and distances) between runs as contained in the “FF universe”.

Best Fantastic Four Runs of All Time:

1. Lee/Kirby
2. John Byrne
3. Mark Waid/Mike Wieringo
4. Walt Simonson
5. Carlos Pacheco

Worst Fantastic Four Runs of All Time:

1. Tom DeFalco/Paul Ryan
2. Chris Claremont/Salvador LarRoca
3. Jim Lee/Brandon Choi
4. Roy Thomas’s second FF run
5. Gerry Conway

Now that the FF stats are done, expect me to write articles about each run, i.e. analysis beyond numbers. Also stay tuned for other runs, such as Incredible Hulk, Green Lantern, and Amazing Spider-Man.

Thanks for reading, from ComicBooks.Bad-Dreams.com. Hope you enjoyed my original never seen before content.

Tags: analysis, Average, Brandon Choi, carlos pacheco, comic book, Comic Book Artists, Comic Book Reviews, Comic Book Writers, Continuity and History, creative team, fantastic four, Gerry Conway, jack kirby, john byrne, mark millar, mark waid, methodology, Normalized, Paul Ryan, roy thomas, stan lee, Steve Englehart, Tom DeFalco, walt simonson